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Surviving the Information Explosion
Christine Alvarado and Jaime Teevan
Overview
Motivation Background Our study Preliminary results Future work
Let Us Interview You!
Email:–What’s the last email you read? What did you do with it?–Have you gone back to an email you’ve read before?
Files:
Web:
–What’s the last file you looked at? How did you get to it?–Have you searched for a file?
–What’s the last Web page you visited? How did you get there?–Have you searched for anything on the Web?
The Information Explosion
You must extract information from: 1.6 billion web pages [Google] Dozens of incoming emails daily Hundreds of files on your personal computer
Limited Organizational Tools
Limited Organizational Tools
Many separate tools Limited organizational support Organizational burden on user Information overwhelms tools
Haystack:Personal Information Storage
Email Web pages
Files Calendar
Contacts
Haystack
Haystack:Personal Information Storage
What was that paper I read last week about
Information Retrieval?Haystack
Haystack:Personal Information Storage
Ah yes! Thank you.
Haystack
User Interface
Pine
Microsoft Outlook
User Study: Goals
Search– Frequency– Type
Organization– Patterns– Use
RATIONALE
Pre-Study [Summer 2001]Setup
6 subjects Observed/recorded working for 1-2 hours Follow-up interview
Pre-studyAreas to Explore
Window placement Desktop organization Context switches Navigation Searches
Previous Work
Paper documents– [Malone, 1983], [Whittaker & Hirshberg, 2001]
Files– [Barreau & Nardi, 1995]
Web (bookmarks)– [Abrams, 1998]
Email/Calendar– [Whittaker & Snider, 1996], [Bellotti & Smith, 2000]
Whittaker and Hirshberg, 2001
Method– Web survey, 50 AT&T employees– Follow-up interview, 14 employees
Goal– Determine attitudes toward paper information organization
Results– Obsolescence– Uniqueness– Filers vs. Pilers
Method
Subjects– 15 MIT CS graduate students (5 women, 10 men)
Setup– 10 short interviews (~ 5 min.)– 1 long interview (~ 45 min.)
Topics– Web, Email, Files
Short Interviews
2 question types– What was the last email/file/web page you looked
at?– Did you search for any email/file/web page?
Goal: Discover patterns in searching and browsing
Long Interviews
“Guided tour” of subject’s bookmarks, email, and file system
Goals:– Discover organizational patterns– Relate organization to
search/browse behavior– Discover problems in
organizational structure
Remember Your Answers?
Getting to a Web page
3 out of 13 Web searches are for information that the user has seen before 64% of searched for email is found in the user’s Inbox
– Using a bookmark: 57% of accesses
– Typing a URL: 20% of accesses
– 19% of above followed links from there
Results based on 85 short interviews
Results
Quantitative– Numbers, counts– Reproducible
Qualitative– Anecdotes– Building hypotheses– Categorization of behaviors
Search: Preliminary Results
Different types of searches– Directory lookup– Confirming information exists– Finding a specific piece of information (QA)– Learning about a topic (Browse)
Cross type searches Interactions with people Searching heavily relied on, very successful
Search: Future Work
Causes of failure Previously viewed information
– Additional cues used for retrieval
Function of browsing during search
Organization: Future Work
Consistency of organization across types Context used in organization Organization’s effect on search
Haystack: Applying What We Learn
Verify our conclusions Boundaries between information types Automation versus support Interaction between search and browsing
Questions?
To learn more about Haystack:
http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu
Contact us with comments:
